Taking an Intoxilyzer Test

Because drunk driving accidents result in nearly 12,000 deaths each year, law enforcement officials take driving while intoxicated very seriously. During holidays, teams of policemen often set up sobriety checkpoints to look for drunk drivers. One way the police can test your blood alcohol content, or BAC, is by giving you an Intoxilyzer test.

How Alcohol Gets In Your Breath

The Intoxilyzer machine measures the amount of alcohol in your breath to determine your BAC. Despite what many people may think, it is not the smell of alcohol on your breath that determines the BAC. In fact, alcohol particles are actually floating in your exhalations.

When you drink alcohol, it is absorbed into your bloodstream via your mouth, throat, stomach, and intestines. The blood with the alcohol circulates around your body, eventually getting to your lungs. Once there, the alcohol escapes into the air in the alveoli, or the little air sacs in the lungs. The amount of alcohol that evaporates into your breath is generally proportionate to the amount in your blood.

The Intoxilyzer 5000

There are a number of different machines that test your BAC, including the Intoxilyzer 5000. Instead of relying on chemical reactions, like a Breathalyzer machine, the Intoxilyzer measures your BAC based on infrared spectroscopy.

Different compounds absorb infrared light in different amounts. Therefore, the Intoxilyzer bases its test on alcohol's ability to take in infrared light. The bonds that form compounds vibrate in specific ways, and soak up a variety of wavelengths of infrared light. If you measure the amount of infrared that a sample absorbs, you can determine the concentration of the chemical compounds, as well as identify the types of compounds that are present in a sample.

When you breathe into an Intoxilyzer 5000, your breath passes through a sample chamber where infrared light is sent through your exhalation. A microprocessor measures that amount of infrared that is absorbed, and converts it into your BAC.

Contact Us

If you have failed or refused an Intoxilyzer test and are now in jail, you should immediately seek the help of an experienced attorney. Contact Austin jail release lawyer Ian Inglis today at 512-472-1950.